Each MacBook Pro includes an ExpressCard/34 expansion card slot, as well as two USB 2.0 ports and one FireWire 400 port. Additional jacks provide one audio line in and one audio line out port, each supporting both optical digital and analog.

A scrolling TrackPad and illuminated keyboard round out the input with the infrared Apple Remote, and each notebook is powered by a 60 Watt hour lithium polymer battery alongside an 85W AC power adapter with Apple's MagSafe magnetic power connector.

The 1.67Ghz model includes a PCI Express-based ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 128MB of GDDR3 memory, while the 1.83Ghz version touts the same graphics card with 256MB of GDDR3 memory.

Additional built-to-order options include the ability to upgrade to a 120GB 5400rpm- or 100GB 7200rpm-hard drive, add up to 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM, add an Apple USB Modem, and sign up for the AppleCare Protection Plan warranty service.

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Anyone have any idea of the battery life of the new MacBook? I haven't been able to find it so far on Apple's website... or anywhere else for that matter. (granted any site mac related is taking much longer to load than normal at the moment, so my search is slow)

Did Steve mention anything about when a 17" version may become available? I need a wider screen. Am I correct in assuming that the 67% brighter screen is in fact a comparison to the recently touted brighter screens on the PowerBook, which are also subject to the complaints of gray lines?

MacBook Pro does have Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), which supports longer (and cheaper) cables than FW800. If you don't want to fall back to FW400 (or if you are reserving that bus for your video), just plug your external drives into a SAN controller with GbE and you are good to go... The big question is whether or not the mobo-chip they are using to do GbE can handle "jumbo" frame-sizes. The chip on the PB-G4 is limited to 1500 bytes, which is inefficient when beaming 25gb files around.

The point about the modem is well taken, but if given a choice of which chipset I want to have drawing on my battery, I would choose the new built-in iSight camera over a modem; however, the notion of built-in cameras and microphones, in general, is a bit disturbing. You see, there are unscrupulous people who write software, or download it off the Net and package it up with a Mac installer as something that its not. When you enter your username and password into the Authentication dialog, this stuff can take your picture and send it back to the developer, or install some app that opens your mic and turn-ons your iSight and start streaming across the Internet to gawdonlyknowswhere.com. Sound crazy? Just yesterday, some guy "announced" that he was actually delivering the only driver in the world to be able to read Microsoft's proprietary MDB files. Imagine that --after 15 years of keeping people out of its files, this guy comes along and announces he has broken the code. Of course, all he was doing was repackaging some freeware hacks that bit bangers have released into the public domain over the years. He pieced them together with a Mac installer and pawned it off for $30 bucks a throw. No telling how many takers and absolutely no warning to the customers, just 'gimme $30 and here's a commercial driver for using MDB files on the Mac'. If people can do that to get you to enter your username and password, they can do just about anything...and now anything includes turning on a high-resolution camera and microphone attached to your broadband connection. Yikes!

I could swear I read somewhere that providing fw800 on Intel logic boards will be a challenge, since the architecture isn't designed to support it. This was discussed at length some six months ago, when Jobs announced the move. In other words, it's not a surprise that there is no built-in fw800. We'll have to wait for it to appear in the future. I doubt Apple would abandon it without a good fight. I guess they just wanted the 'book out the door as soon as possible, and decided that fw800 was a reasonable sacrifice.

While I've been typing this, I've come up with a great slogan to go with MacBook Pro...

"MacBook Pro, a downgraded name, for a downgraded PowerBook"

I don't think they'll use that...

The new iMac seems to be a great bargin... No need for Universal Binary Pro apps on the consumer iMac.. Huge upgrade from x600 to x1600 graphics... Impressive..

Of the 2 Intel Macs introduced, the iMac is the one that for me, wasn't *downgraded*...

The Intel PowerBook (who's the idiot that decided to do away with millions of $$$ of marketing and brand awareness and came up with MacBook Pro?) is missing so many things that as a laptop user I *NEED* that it is a significant *DOWNGRADE* from the PowerBook G4...

oooo it's faster.. Great, about damn time, but what about features road warriors *need*?

No Firewire 800... The lack of Firewire 800 is disappointing.. So, I buy the new IntelBook and see *less* performance with my ext. drives? I could go out and buy a Firewire 800 PC Card... Oh..

No Cardbus support... If they had kept the PC Card/Cardbus standard, I could add a Firewire 800 card, but, no. The ExpressCard size they offer support for is the smaller of 2 card sizes... If the larger format card had been supported, we'd have S-ATA and Firewire cards already available.. Searching the ExpressCard site, reveals many interesting ExpressCard/54 cards, but none will work with this new "Pro" Mac laptop... So now what? We buy the latest, greatest Apple "Pro" machine and not use our "Pro" accessories to their specs?

Downgraded Superdrive? The new Powe.. MacBook Pro no longer offers a high speed dual-layer SuperDrive? Again, I thought this was supposed to be an *upgrade*???

No modem? Um, great... I guess Jobs never travels outside a WiFi cloud, but for the majority of road warriors, that just isn't the case! Now when I and my belongings are being strip searched by TSA, I have to worry about the small white piece of plastic (Apple's $49 usb modem) getting lost? Who's the brainiac that came up with this one?

No S-Video out? Great, so now I can't connect the laptop to my clients TVs they have in their conference rooms without *gasp* some kind of 3rd party adaptor I'll need to lug around? Again, isn't this supposed to be Apple's latest and *GREATEST* "PRO" laptop??? And they're *removing* features? This isn't the iBook Steve, it's the *POWERBOOK*! Apple's *PRO* laptop!!!

While this laptop may be faster than stink, in all other ways, it just plain stinks. The lack of attention to the *needs* of the potential users of this product is the kind of thing I'd expect from Micro$oft, or Dell.. Not Apple.

So Apple comes out with a dual core laptop that's 4X faster, has a larger screen, much improved graphics card and sells for the same price as the old one and all I see is a bunch of complaining. Waaaa, I don't like the name, there's no modem, no S-Video, Waaa!

About the name - who cares what it's called? Would it be a better machine with a different name? If they called it a SuperAwesomeProPowerNeatBook Plus would it make it faster, slower, better? I don't personally like the name either (I prefer ProBook) but it really doesn't affect the operation of the computer.

No modem? So what? I haven't dialed up to the Internet for seven years - even once. And even if I did need to dial up what's the big deal with having a little adapter? Don't you already carry around a charger, DVI->VGA adapter, headphones, etc? I really don't see the problem here.

No S-Video? When was the last time you plugged into a TV in a conference room? You're supposed to be professionals - use a projector. Besides, you'll still need an adapter for sound anyway.

Are there some things that need to be improved? Sure. The DVD writing speed is dismal. 4X, come on, we can do better than that. FW800 would be nice I suppose but I can't find any Intel chipsets with FW800 built in so I imagine this isn't just Apple's decision to drop the built-in FW800 port. I imagine it won't be long before ExpressCard/34 cards are available for all sorts of peripherals. Keep in mind that the MacBook Pro isn't even shipping yet.

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